This paper is action research on the design of activities for successful ice-breaking in Japanese language classes, based on reflections of teaching practice conducted over three terms at Akita International University's Graduate School. I strongly felt the need for ice-breaking in online classes and conducted several activities during the teaching practice, but the number of interactions varied depending on the activities. This paper examines and analyses, from the perspective of activity design, whether the three ice-breaking activities conducted during the teaching practice were appropriate for achieving the three purposes of ice-breaking: (1) tension reduction, (2) relationship building, and (3) preparatory exercises. I then present measures to improve these activities and propose suggestions for future ice-breaking activities for online classes.

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This paper mainly discusses the issue of L2 learners’ recognition of corrective feedback from teachers of Japanese. I recognized a problem of learners’ unawareness of my corrective feedback during my classes through three, successive teaching practices. To solve this problem, I investigated what kind of feedback I gave to the learners and how they reacted to the feedback by examining the learners’ immediate responses. As a result of the investigation, I found that learners tend to overlook my implicit corrective feedback like recast. Based on the result, I came up with some suggestions for improvement, such as changing the tone of incorrect parts and using explicit correction for learners with lower levels of proficiency.

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